Dune’s set photographer releases stunning book of images from the movie

A set photographer’s job can be daunting.

A movie set is a place where hundreds of individuals are working to create a film. Only one individual has the responsibility of capturing pictures from that process. That difficulty is compounded by the fact that the photographer is usually pretty low on the director and crew’s priority list during production.

On the set of his sci fi epic DuneDenis Villeneuve made set photographer Chiabella James feel like she was just as important as everyone else in the process, and that, according to James, is why the photographs from the shoot were so beautiful, and how they captured the mood of the film so perfectly. The gorgeous book contains hundreds of these photos Dune Part One The Photography, James has recently published a book.

For James, the entire process started with one outstanding meeting with Villeneuve, which she said was “awe-inspiring.”

“I felt like we closed the door to the office, and he opened the door to his world for me,” James told Polygon in an interview over Google Meet. “And listening to Denis talk about what was so important to him, I came away from that meeting really understanding the importance of the landscape.”

Image: Chiabella James/Insight Editions

But actually capturing those incredible landscapes, like the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, wasn’t easy. In this case, it meant battling the elements to really capture each and every one of the movie’s elaborate sets and locations.

“You’re hiking up the rock and you think, Okay, then, today is going to A Day,” James says, mimicking her on-set exhaustion in her voice. “Then you see that the next set is all the way up there. There is only one way out, and that’s by climbing rope. And you’re thinking, I don’t know how I’m gonna do that. I’m already melting, and my cameras are melting and my lens is crunching from the grit and the sand. And I don’t know how to do this. And yet you do it because you want to see, you want to get there, you want to be part of that.”

Image: Chiabella James/Insight Editions

Image: Chiabella James/Insight Editions

Image: Chiabella James/Insight Editions

Of course, the desert offered plenty of grueling conditions even when James wasn’t climbing up cliffs. The heat wreaked havoc on the photographer’s cameras, causing them to power down and overheat, sometimes after just one photo. James had to seek shade whenever she could to save her camera equipment. She would even duck behind people to keep her cameras from the heat for a few moments.

All of it seems worth the effort. This book contains beautiful photos of sets, actors and locations. Dune Even more life. James claims that it captures the exact same mood and spirit as the film, which is a challenging goal she says she sets for every film. James attributes this success to Villeneuve’s approach and the time they spent together planning the film.

She speaks of his desire to include her and the vision of Dune early on distinguished it from other shoots she’s worked on. Villeneuve’s concept art, featuring tiny figures against a vast desert landscape and tiny figures, was shown to her by Villeneuve. This gave her a chance to create something very different.

Image: Chiabella James/Insight Editions

“It gave me the freedom to not worry about an actor’s face,” James says. “Normally for me on most movies, [if you] shoot this big landscape with a teeny-tiny actor that you can’t see their face, [it] doesn’t get used. This picture looks nice, but it’s not used. This time, it was more important. And that gave me the freedom to shoot with that vision, which for me was great because I love that kind of photography.”

It all shows in the gorgeous end products — both the book and the movie — and James says it all traces back to that first meeting.

“That original meeting with Denis was probably one of the most awe-inspiring director meetings I’ve ever had before a job,” she says. “[It] felt like I was preparing for an entire film made up of stills and photographs.”